Doctor At Dien-Bien-Phu

Major Paul Grauwin

• Publisher: Normanby Press
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781786256850
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Includes 34 illustrations.The searing firsthand account of the horrors suffered by the French paratroops and soldiers during the siege of Dien Bien Phu at the hands of the Viet Minh.During the course of the First Indochina War, the French had established a base at Dien Bien Phu in late 1953. Dr. Grauwin, holding the rank of major, arrived in February 1954 to take charge of the 42-bed hospital unit there, conducting triage for evacuation and operating when necessary.By the end of the battle in May, Grauwin had more than 1, 300 wounded in the makeshift wards of his hospital, and deprived by the shelling of electricity, was forced to operate by candlelight. With the fall of the base on May 7, he was taken into captivity by the Viet Minh.Grauwin remained in captivity until June 1, when he and other French medical officers were exchanged for several hundred Vietnamese prisoners.

X—APRIL

THE network of trenches was now well organized; you could go from the command post to the field hospital and from there to the Second Group or to the Eighth Assault without having to sprint across open ground as was the case before. And at last there was some sort of a tunnel passing under the road and linking the Second Airborne with the central command post.

I had taken over half the Airborne Commandos’ shelters, and getting stretchers between them and the field hospital was still a very dangerous affair, for you had to leave the passage by the north entrance, pass along the road which was constantly under fire and go down again into the gloomy entrance to the Airborne Commandos’ quarters. When the wounded man on the stretcher was moaning with pain you could hardly run.

I was afraid there would be trouble—and there was. One day a Thaï N.C.O. who was helping us was killed outright while engaged in this work. So then I asked Colonel Langlais if I could have a covered trench, where stretchers could pass, under the road, similar to the one which already linked his command post with the central one. He gave his consent and put me in touch with Lieutenant Maury. The job was simple enough: two teams would be engaged, one on the Airborne Commandos’ side, the other on ours. They would start digging at the same moment and finally meet in the middle of the road. Then the trench, once it had been dug, would need to be covered with large beams and metal plates. It would only take a quarter of an hour to make the road fit for traffic again.

“Right, Major,” Maury told me, “just let me know when you want it done. At night would be better, of course...it is out of the question by day.”

I decided to have the work put in hand the same evening, but at ten o’clock a support post at Huguette was attacked. Trucks kept on going by and nothing could be allowed to get in their way.

The next evening, when I was about to ring Lieutenant Maury, the Vietminhs started laying down an artillery barrage.

At last the evening came when the two teams got to work. It was a pitch-dark night and everything went well; the ground under the road was as hard as stone, and when I had a few minutes off I took the sappers some hot coffee and rum; every now and then the Viets sent up a flare; everybody crouched down and for a few minutes bursts from automatic weapons and shells whistled over our heads.

Since the fall of Dominique 3 danger was everywhere, for it was now enemy territory. Its heights menaced all that remained to us. The Viets had observation posts there and had set up numbers of mortars on the slopes, and here and there you could make out cleverly concealed loopholes.

I was in a great hurry to get the work finished; all my coolies lent a hand, and even a few of my orderlies. Everything was ready to cover over the gap in the road; at nightfall a truck had brought over six large beams of wood and iron.

It was about two in the morning when a salvo of mortars exploded on our roof and on the road. Then what I had feared happened. A sapper N.C.O. came to see me in the resuscitation ward, where I was having a look round, to say, “One of my men has been hit.”

A few minutes later my orderlies brought a Moroccan sapper in on a stretcher. A mortar shell had exploded only two or three yards behind him. There was a huge hole in the middle of his back: his vertebrae were shattered and the spinal cord destroyed. In the few seconds before he died, I seemed to read a reproach to me in his eyes.

I gave orders to suspend work on the road, as I was responsible for the death of this man; the work could be left to the next day.

A sapper N.C.O. phoned his major. In a few moments he was on the scene. “No, no, Doctor, it’s all in the day’s work. Don’t you worry...when a battalion commander gives the order to attack, he knows that he is going to lose men...that’s how it is.”

Work started again and was finished by dawn. It was now possible to pass directly from the field hospital to the Airborne Commandos. The wounded and the orderlies no longer ran any risks.

I still had only six of the Airborne Commandos’ shelters and I needed them all; then I would have two hundred and fifty beds in my main field hospital, without counting those in many neighbouring shelters.

Here again Colonel Langlais was a great help to me and gave orders for all the remaining shelters to be evacuated. The Thaïs began digging cells and holes alongside their trenches and in the walls of their fighting outposts and came to resemble a large family of rats.

But the roofing of the main trench was weaker than ours, and in places there was no cover at all. This aroused fresh anxieties. In the walls of this main trench my orderlies dug some fifteen little recesses, each one of which would take a wounded man full length.

In the end Colonel Langlais had still more shelters cleared, but they were not linked to my main group. They came from the north-west command post, which was now useless, the paratroop operational command and an intelligence section which were now also out of work.

This gave me fifty more places, but only for walking wounded. I planned to put there, those with arm wounds, those who had lost an eye, and those with thorax or head wounds which were well on the way to being cured.

I would have needed Fleury to get all this work carried out to perfection. But Fleury had been killed on the night of March the 30th, an hour after he left us under fire from the Viets.

His fighting outpost was a trench at the extreme west of the airfield. In the course of the attack on the Dominique positions the Viets infiltrated and reached him. His flamethrower transformed them into living torches for a few minutes, but he ran out of fuel and once more a wave of them advanced. He started firing with his Tommy gun, but he could not see too well...he would do better standing up. He climbed out of the trench and his huge figure emerged erect to confront the Viets. He emptied two magazines and suddenly went down, facing the enemy; he was killed instantly, pierced by a hundred bullets.

So my signet-ring remains on my finger.

Gone too was our delightful ‘Duck’—Sergeant Stetter. With the fall of Dominique he was lost to us, which made Bacus say with a wry smile when day broke on March the 31st, “It’s eight o’clock and there is no ‘Duck’.”

I was now quite used to the sound of the four-barrelled machine-gun and the rhythm of its reverberation. It went on day and night, its four barrels aimed at Dominique, from where every sign of life had vanished. But you could just make out mole-hills, narrow trenches, camouflaged emplacements.

One of the men who fired this gun was wounded by a shell-splinter, luckily not a serious wound, and while dressing it I talked to him about this weapon of his. “Oh, Major,” he said, “if you only knew what a beauty she is. If we had twenty of them here, we would have no trouble.”

He spoke of ‘her’ lovingly, as a sportsman speaks of a race-horse. So I too developed an affection for her and I often used to listen to her when I had a chance to lie on my bed, beneath the vent-hole. She fired up to the last minute.

After the surrender I made a pilgrimage to her. For twenty square yards around her there was a carpet of empty shell-cases some three feet thick. And hundreds of craters, superimposed on one another. The weapon was lying on the ground, the barrels pointing uselessly to the sky. She made me think of a wounded stag lying on the ground overwhelmed by the fight made before accepting defeat.

I also recognized the sound of the 155 gun, the only one left. That too fired up to the last minute. It went off with a dull shock, so forcible that it made the ground shake.

I went there too after the fall of Dien-Bien-Phu. The hollow in which it was still standing was like the huge crater made by a ton bomb, and for a hundred and fifty yards around the earth had an apocalyptic aspect, not a square inch of it intact—no insect, no worm would have been able to live there. You had to look hard to find the entrances to shelters round the hollow to which the gunners crawled back after firing.

Dominique having fallen, the problem of water had become even more pressing.

The water fatigue—it was my daily terror, precise in its movements as those of a ballet. I felt the time slip by, six o’clock and the trampling on my roof, the sound of empty cans knocking against one another, half past six and the explosions, K seven and the arrival at the north entrance of the five or six wounded who were still able to walk. “Major, you’re wanted in the resuscitation ward.”

The filter had been set up near the bridge and was now under fire from Dominique. To get there, new trenches had to be dug; one of them went zig-zagging from the Second Airborne’s blockhouses, crossed the barbed-wire entanglement, went along the river bank and ended by the bridge. This was the way my water-carriers went. When they reached the bridge they had to come out into the open, run to the filter and fill the jerricans with water.

It was a fearful problem. I had five jerricans and my coolies made the journey twice a day, in the morning at six and in the evening at five. That brought in over forty gallons; it was not much, but it had to suffice.

I had to send the fatigue party to the filter during the day. At night nobody was allowed to leave his post, and at six in the morning the carriers went off to the trench while there was still a slight mist to hide the ground from the Viets, but they had to be quick about it, for a 105 and mortars had long kept the bridge and its immediate neighbourhood under fire.

Towards the middle of April, with only two journeys a day, I had already lost three of my coolies, but often, after a great influx of wounded, the water-tank was dry and I had to order a third journey.

In the last fortnight the mud in the passages leading to the river reached three feet in depth and my water-carriers came back enveloped in mud up to the waist and above, out of breath and exhausted. At the beginning of April the journey took ten minutes, at the end two hours.

So every morning, boys with jerricans on their shoulders went down from the Elianes, the Eighth Assault, the Second Thaï Battalion, the artillery and came out at the filter. All of a sudden, without a word of warning, twenty shells would explode around them, and many companies had waited in vain for their water, until my phone informed them, “Take the names of three of your people who have just been wounded by the bridge.”

Chevalier had just died when Boisbouvier came in, his second experience of a stretcher.

Chevalier was a lieutenant; a bullet had gone right through the back of his neck and had sundered the spinal cord just below the medulla. If the medulla had been hit he would have been killed instantly.

It was quite out of the question to undress him; when he was touched he did not cry out, but moaned softly, like a child. The moment he saw me he said, “Major, I’ve had it, I know.”

It was true too.

The nervous tissues degenerated daily. Daily, paralysis gained control of the legs, the stomach, the thorax, the arms; but the respiratory and cardiac centres situated in the brain were only affected a few minutes before death, and he remained terribly conscious up to the last minute.

Sensitivity to pain persisted and became more acute; he also remained conscious of hunger and thirst. Twice a day Genevieve gave him soup with a tea-spoon. The chaplain was often with him and they had whispered conversations together which lasted some minutes.

I tried the whole range of sedatives: Dolosal, Phenergan, morphia, sedol and gardenal. Nothing had any effect, he remained conscious up to the moment of his death.

He died after six days of it, still wearing his battledress. The chaplain was still talking to him when his heart stopped.

Boisbouvier was in for the second time, with some ten shell-splinters in him, but examination showed that none of them was serious. But the...

Table of contents

• Title page
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
• LINE DRAWINGS
• PROLOGUE
• I-MY LAST ASSIGNMENT
• II-‘C’ COLUMN
• III-THE FIELD HOSPITAL
• IV-SURGERY AT THE FRONT
• V-THE ATTACK
• VI-THE DAYS THAT FOLLOWED
• VII-A NIGHT AT THAÏ-BINH
• VIII-THE DOMINIQUE POSITIONS
• IX-GENEVIÈVE
• X-APRIL
• XI-A DAY OF HAPPINESS
• XII-THE PARATROOPS
• XIII-STILL MORE MEN
• XIV-LAST ROUND OF INSPECTION
• XV-THE GENERAL
• XVI-PRISONER